Some fifty-seven years ago I finished my duties as RMO at the Melbourne Hospital, and obtained a position at the Children's Hospital, which was then in Pelham Street, Carlton. There I met for the first time Gordon Murray Tallent who was never called anything but Murray Tallent.

He was a big man, redheaded, comfortable, easygoing, noisy and humorous, with a type of personality that was most enjoyable, and a physician of alarming alertness in diagnosis, medical judgment and treatment. His sense of humour, I think, derived somewhat from his family background. He used to delight in telling a story about his father. If there were a minor sort of family row going on, the `old man' would get somewhat upset to the point of irritability and exclaim `I have had enough of this, I can't stand any more, I'm going out, I'm sleeping at the club'. The trouble was, Murray used to add, that his father did not have a club. On occasions later if there was a row pending, Murray would say `Going to the club, Father?'.

Audible throughout a ward in which he happened to be teaching students, he inculcated the importance of correct history taking, employing a considerable amount of humour as, to him, it was synonymous with a sense of proportion. Diligence was demanded of students; lack of it was not tolerated. He had a commanding presence and a happy approach to his teaching, so much so that students often enjoyed respite from other more senior but somewhat drab and repetitive teachers, welcoming Murray as a substitute.

My meeting with him produced a friendship which lasted long indeed. He preceded me to London in 1929, passed his MRCP with the equanimity and flair which he displayed in passing examinations and was attached to the Brompton Hospital with Geoffrey Todd as medical superintendent. I arrived the following year and found that Murray had obtained for me a position as house physician in the Brompton. In those days, when tuberculosis was rife and treatment dubious, the experience was most helpful. We learned the technique of artificial pneumothorax, and the importance of those apical crepitations. All of us did our own Ziehl-Neelson stains.

That summer we travelled together with Geoff Todd through Europe in Geoff's rather beaten-up Austin car, and in 1931 we journeyed together in the Aquitania to the Boston Hospital for Children, dominated by Professor Blackfan, a fine paediatrician of great experience. Returning to London we both did stints at Queen Square, learning how really to examine the nervous system in the daunting presence of people like Gordon Holmes, Adie, Collier, Greenfield and Carmichael. Who could forget `appearance, posture, tone, power and co-ordination'? Murray used to tell me to be careful of Gordon Holmes, because if there was any laxity on your part in giving the clinical findings, he was likely to grab you by your coat lapels and shake you as a dog might a rat, and he was a big powerful man, but a wonderful teacher of neurology.

We parted company in 1932 with Murray preceding me home, and both of us were appointed to what was then the Homeopathic Hospital in St Kilda Road, later to be resuscitated as a teaching hospital by Sir Alan Newton and renamed Prince Henry's. Murray stayed on at Prince Henry's and became its senior inpatient physician in 1945, whilst I cut adrift and joined the Children's Hospital.

In 1934, he married Thelma Hooper, who had been a sister at the Children's Hospital - dear gentle person, with widely spaced, all seeing, brown eyes, who in 1927 was awarded the Jeffreys Wood Medal for nursing excellence. She was endowed with the true nursing spirit of gentleness and kindness. I was best man at their wedding. They had three sons, John, David and Richard, and later seven grandchildren. Murray died very suddenly and tragically in 1958. Thelma died in 1983 after twenty-five lonely and sad years without his company.